Richard Johnston had a political career unlike any other — and just celebrated a birthday he thought he’d never see

I’m told the thing about celebrating your 80th birthday is that it tends to make you plenty retrospective about life. You look back and wonder whether you achieved everything you had hoped to, and start cataloguing the wouldas, shouldas, and couldas.

Richard Johnston, who was the MPP for Scarborough West from 1979 to 1990, admits there is regret at not having achieved some of the things he wanted to in politics. But then again, there is joy at the fact that he even made it to 80, which he did this past Saturday. After all, Johnston could easily have died at least three times over the years: once in 1984 when he suffered a heart attack in his late 30s; once when a mob threatened to storm the Parliament buildings in Vilnius where he was monitoring Lithuania’s first post-Soviet elections; and once when he was stricken with throat cancer five years ago.

So, yes, it’s great to be alive, even if not everything got checked off his political to-do list.

In the mid-1970s, Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis was [..] This is an excerpt. Read the full article at TVO.org.